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Talk:Athena's Glory
This would be a good multiplayer map -- Jules753 07:42, April 28, 2010 (UTC) Flood Barrier sealing off Athena's Glory? Been taking a VERY close look at the entrance to Athena's Glory and it finally dawned on me that it's not all the rubble that prevents Jack from getting into there. On the other side of the rubble is a large concrete barrier. If you look at the barrier (no clip around to get a good view) you will see that it has scorch marks/minor blast damage(?) on it. So what is this barrier? Think a moment, if one of the tram tunnels was heavily damaged or destroyed what would happen to the nearby buildings? There is nothing we can see to stop the water. No doors, no airlock no nothing so everything would flood. A break in the tram tunnel near Athena's Glory would flood Athena's Glory, the Central Square (and the Bistro), Mercury Suites and whatever was on the other side of the rubble off the Central Square by the Gatherer's Garden. Thousands could die in a couple minutes. There is a similar situation in the Apollo Square area. This really does not track for an underwater city. I know they made some odd (read: stupid) decisions in building Rapture, but it seems to me it would be utterly insane NOT to have a way to seal off the tram tunnels from the buildings. So the barrier sealing off Athena's Glory is actually a Flood Prevention Barrier. (It might have been set off by accident or someone used it to seal off Athena's Glory from the splicers.) Now where did the barrier come from? The most logical place would be in the ceiling, hidden behind a decorative façade. If you ever need to activate the barrier you just remove whatever is holding it in place (clamps or whatever) and let gravity do the work. Something that big would smash just about anything under it flat. Getting the flood barrier back up may be a problem, but the barrier's purpose is to keep the building from being flooded. Not sure if this barrier should be mentioned anyplace other than for Athena's Glory. sm --Solarmech (talk) 19:30, March 31, 2016 (UTC) :Such a barrier would have to seal tightly -- grooves in walls and indent into floor to receive and seal the entire edge of the 'door'. A spring loaded plate covered catchment large enough for any obstructions to be crushed/sheared and pushed into by the door which then you probably want hydraulically forced (and some similar mechanism to lift them again - after emergency is fixed or after routine testing/maintenance). Consider if a trolley was in the way, the door would have to shear through it to seal properly (utilizing shear blades on the doors edges to facilitate that). :You don't want any significant openings left by crushed materials, as water pressure at Rapture's visible depth will pass through even small/thin gaps and fill-up virtually all the air volume in a very short time (minutes). Small hairline openings could be handled by local pumps til repairs were completed. :Such a Bulkhead safety door (and its mechanisms) would have to be up or down in the building structure within its own sealed space. With the size of the openings (versus a 6 X 7 foot Securis door opening) these doors would be quite huge (and being a flat plate be quite thick to withstand the force put upon it whole surface at ocean pressure with the force being transfered to the doors well anchored frame). Two intermeshing doors might work, but would be that much more complicated. :You probably would want a bulkhead like this protecting each end of those in-game tramway viaducts. IF it was a real logical system that ran through/continued between multiple building clusters, you might want each cluster's tram station sealed seperate and protected by smaller Securis doors, and thus need only one of these huge/expensive bulkhead door system for the tracks. (You would also have man sized airlocks into the track viaduct to allow repairs pumping out and repressurization IF such a catastrophic leak took place. : 11:17, April 1, 2016 (UTC) ::This is Rapture, they did some not so bright things in it's design. ;) I think we should consider ourselves lucky they even hinted at a flood barrier anyplace in the tram tunnels. Considering the damage and rubble around the barrier that closes off Athena's Glory I suspect that Raptures design isn't nearly as well thought out as what you have come up with. Given the debris the barrier made well have pushed up from below rather than been dropped. That way you could put an angle on the top of the barrier to throw anything in the way to one side of the barrier (in this case towards the tram tunnel.) and "cut" through the façade to get a solid seal. Hydraulic rams would certainly work, but a counter weight could also be used. (Barrier is 100 tons, counter weight in 150 tons). The barriers would have to be thick, but no thicker than the walls of the buildings. As a note we see a number of the Securis doors exposed to the outside water pressure in the game The Welcome Center and the Medical Wing). They do NOT handle it well. sm --Solarmech (talk) 18:24, April 1, 2016 (UTC) ::: ::: ::: :::This is an interesting thought exercise, but I fear you both are putting much more thought into this than the game designers did. You used Console Commands to get past the debris to look at this barrier, but what did you really see? Is it a concrete barrier or is it just a wall? A wall that, like all the other walls in that part of Olympus Heights, has the concrete texture added to it. The reason you see this wall instead of an actual entrance to Athena's Glory is that the designers never intended for you to see it. It was always meant to be blocked off by the crash site, so why go to the bother of adding the details? :::One might call this cutting corners, but we see this all over the game. Look at this familiar blocked off passageway in the Medical Pavilion. If you use console commands to look past the debris, you'll see the corridor leads to nothing but a blank wall. The same can be said for the hall where the Nitro Splicer emerges from in Dr. Steinman's Aesthetic Ideals. :::Admittedly, it would be very logical to have a Flood Prevention Barrier in front of all major thoroughfares, but there isn't one in front of Mercury Suites, Artemis Suites, or Hestia Chambers, so I fail to believe there would be one in front of Athena's Glory. While there was serious consideration put into how a city would function at the bottom of the sea (geothermal power, rooftop garden's providing oxygen, high strength glass tunnels between buildings, etc.) certain sacrifices were made to make a visually appealing game. These sacrifices include geometric, art deco exterior designs and wide, open corridors that leave a huge impact on the player as he or she arrives at a new apartment complex. In the end, unless it's actually mentioned to be somewhere, this is all speculation, and we shouldn't just assume that's a flood prevention barrier when the more simple answer is it's just a border wall. :::Unownshipper (talk) 19:33, April 1, 2016 (UTC) @Unknownshipper While I TOTALLY agree we are putting a lot more thought into it than the level designers did, we shouldn't always say they didn't think to consider things. Sometimes what seems like a few small things can tell a story. In this case they didn't just put a generic concrete texture on this wall as if it were a simple barrier wall, but one that shows clear weapons fire damage. And it's a big texture stretching across the whole barrier (Offhand I don't recall seeing this texture other places, but it could easily be there and I don't recall it). If they had wanted to hide this wall they could have done a much better job without much effort, but this wall clearly is not hidden. Combined with the rubble and the smashed up tram car you get the outline of a story. "Someone closed the flood barrier, an accident or to keep out splicers? With the Barrier closed, someone attacked it, even trying to smash through with a tram car?" This wall can be seen by the player in normal gameplay, unlike the example you used with the corridor in the Medical Pavilion which you need "no clip" to see it. (The situations are not equal). The story here is little different then the one up in Mercury Suites with the family and the poison. Speaking of Mercury Suites, why should the flood barrier be closed? The tram tunnel isn't flooded. Since there is no way to make a flood barrier look attractive I could VERY easily Ryan ordering them to be hidden. sm --Solarmech (talk) 18:05, April 2, 2016 (UTC) "consideration" rather than "serious consideration". Many things they show are simplistically impractical and didn't include "serious" details of how things really work. Most was done simply for visual effect. Again, there's the issue of budget/time/effort/rendering limitations when it is a shooter game with a sci-fi caricature overlay. It is logical that they wouldn't spend much effort detailing spaces out of sight, though they could have obscured them somewhat better. Since we have the evidence of Rapture still being inhabited 20 years after its construction (in BS2), its structural design could not be THAT shoddy or ineffective in containing the inevitable leaks (including after an extended period with a lack of competent maintenance). We see frequently used AE doors still operational and the Bathyspheres which likewise needed some kind of airlock doors, so adaquate mechanisms were available for emergency bulkheads. Counterweights add complexity, and the first idea of simple gravity drop but with additional weight added could work for an infrequently used mechanism (raising it again could be slow and manually supervised, thus allow simplicity). Consider though how much (huge) weight is needed to cut through a steel tram frame, so a less massive tandem pair of spaced doors might be used (redundancy is always good when it prevents a section of the city becoming a cold wet dark tomb). 02:46, April 2, 2016 (UTC) @Special:Contributions/75.36.142.196 The actual method the barriers deploy is really anyone's guess. What we consider a smart idea the designers of Rapture may have thought was dumb. The important part for me is that the barriers are there. :) As for Rapture's basic design and it still in use after 20 years, I'm no really impressed. We know they had problems with leaks in at least 1959 as show in Eden Leaking. What kept Rapture from flooding was the Big Daddies. In BS2 near the start we see a Rosie seal up a leak in a window. (A Audio Diary from the Cult of Rapture Too Dumb to Die actually has a splicer complaining about the Big Daddies keeping the city "alive" rather than letting it die. Of course even with the Big Daddies, Rapture was totally screwed. Ryan had them use aluminum as a major framing component. (facepalm) sm --Solarmech (talk) 18:05, April 2, 2016 (UTC) Not being quite as fantastical as Infinite BS, you can probably reason for Rapture on expense and (well proven) available era technology and materials/techniques being considerations. Simplicity usually also helps with reliability. Systematic and extensive use of such Barriers ... definitely -- nobody is stupid enough NOT to have them. A meter+ wide slab of reinforced concrete dropping into a reinforced edge slot is pretty effective if those edges can be largely sealed and it can be seated properly (not blocked). If for aesthetics they be made unobtrusive, thin veneer over the slots and more substantial 'break away' flooring is fairly simple (if the tram tracks go through a bulkhead THAT is a bit more complicated but hardly impossible to make workable). By leaks, I also would include massive (if shoddy?) structural failure which Big Daddies likely couldn't solve (and pumps cannot possibly handle). The BD also didn't exist (and were not forseen) when Rapture was first built, so humans would be it for all the expected work. Smaller leaks BD could handle, and probably even were trained to predict and take prevenative action for (ie - "OOOOOM" sonar sounding out internal cracks in structure components). But it all relies on Rapture being well designed and built from the start. Also Aluminium can work a bit better as rebar than steel as water seeps slowly through concrete (doubly bad if its salt water). That Aluminium thing is also from the DLC which has to often be taken with a grain of salt as to what is stated in it. I forget if there was in-game any indicator that Athena's Glory was still inhabitable - the reason the barrier may be down is that it DID suffer a catastrophic leak and IT was closed off from the rest of the City (by that time). I would have the buildings themselves have internal bulkheads protected sections, and multiple paths allowing people to get out/be rescued from still secure sections (and allow controlled ingress for repairs). There actually would be barriers at many other points (like also for the utility systems). 08:14, April 3, 2016 (UTC) :This is all very interesting, it really is, but getting back to the issue of whether or not to add to the main page any information about this supposed barrier: I have concerns/problems with making changes on the article to specifically address or call attention to this. :"...but the entrance to Athena's Glory itself is blocked by alot of debris, a wrecked tram car and a large concrete barrier." :Again, is this a barrier or is it just a wall? I apologize for the semantics, but I assert that there is an important distinction to be made (the old "all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares" argument). It's simple enough to say the entrance is blocked by debris, that's a clear fact. But to say that the entrance is ALSO blocked by a barrier is speculation. :In the image to the right, you see Jack's ordinary view of the scene. One does indeed see a large "destruction texture" on wall, but what it is/what caused it is up for interpretation. What you call scorch damage, blast marks, or weapons fire damage could just as easily, from the player's POV on the ground, look like cracks, crumbling masonry, etc. To answer your question, you do see that texture at other places around Rapture that are damaged. I'm not saying that the concrete isn't damaged, just that you can't tell what caused it, and that said marks could have simply been created when the tram smashed into the wall (whether by terroristic means or by a simple accident) with no need for a supposed battle taking place in front of the entrance. :On this image, you see the scene via aid of Console Commands (i.e. cheating). When you're floating above the wreck site, and only by floating above, can you clearly see that there are no entrances. But let's play devil's advocate and ask where might the doorways to Athena's be? Let's not assume that the entrance has to look the same as the entryway to Mercury Suites; after all, the one to Artemis Suites looks slightly different. Instead, picture an entrance with doorways on the left and right thirds of the wall (as opposed to the center like at MS). If that were the case, then the whitish debris with the rebar completely block said entrances from the player's view. Only by cheating above the normal line of sight could they be visible. :I take slight umbrage with the notion that more could've been done to hide the entrance. We weren't there, we don't know the pressures they were under, and this issue has only been brought up here because we loyal fans obsess over every detail of this game. The suicide family does tell a full story: a group of five were alive, they're now dead, and the unique instrument of their undoing is evident. The same can't quite be said here: a tram car crashed and an apartment building is blocked off, but the how and why is very unclear. How can we assume that there's a barrier of some sort here when one isn't present in any of the other locations (not just in Olympus Heights and Apollo Square, but in the WHOLE of Rapture)? :I don't mind discussing the science or logic of a flood barrier here on the Talk Page, but I think it's FAR too open to interpretation/speculation to make changes to be main article. :Unownshipper (talk) 21:59, April 5, 2016 (UTC) ::@75.36.137.195 Considering we see lights in the windows of Athena's Glory I would say it's still inhabited. :) As for aluminum rebar, I had expected you of all people to know that concrete and aluminum do NOT mix well. ( http://www.theconcreteproducer.com/concrete/how-does-contact-with-aluminum-affect-concrete.aspx ) Basically the aluminum has a chemical reaction with the concrete that causes corrosion. Even if you totally sealed off the aluminum from the concrete, you still have another fatal problem. As aluminum is cyclically stressed (not overstressed) it looses strength and does not stop loosing strength like steel does. Eventually you get to a point where the aluminum has almost no strength at all. British Airways found out about this the VERY hard way with a de Havilland Comet crashing 1954. This is why today aircraft (which are mostly aluminum) are regularly inspected for cracks and other signs of stress related failures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_limit ::Ferrous alloys and titanium alloys2 have a distinct limit, an amplitude below which there appears to be no number of cycles that will cause failure. Other structural metals such as aluminium and copper, do not have a distinct limit and will eventually fail even from small stress amplitudes. ::If you are wondering what cyclic stress the buildings in Rapture would be subjected too, look up how much force water moving at just one mile an hour does and look at how much area the taller buildings in Rapture have. Yeah, Rapture is doomed and I wonder if Levin didn't put that in there JUST so Rapture would be doubly doomed. sm --Solarmech (talk) 09:10, April 6, 2016 (UTC) ::There will be problems requiring special concrete formulation and rebar plating/coating whether you use aluminium or steel (elsewhere basalt fiber rebar was mentioned). Ph control and not mixing metals helps. Aluminium does a bit better, though the game BaS reference was some weird thing they had Ryan say - 'the steel supply will be watched so I'll use aluminum...', which was far more expensive and watched even more (so is nonsensical). Millions of tons of steel in postwar boom easier to lose track of... Steel still might be 'it' if properly material engineered. ::Also the aluminium stress problem might be less an issue, if for physical flexing/temperature differentials which would be minimized with massive concrete construction (8+ feet thick structural walls and internal reinforcements which wouldn't flex). ::You would hope Rapture was somewhat sheltered, ie- IN a volcanic crater (but still gets some turbulance even if out of direct ocean currents), and better with most buildings being quite a bit shorter than the Manhattan Skyline-like views (because it looked good is the only reason). The top half/third of many might even just be for show (art deco tower) and might be more flexible (not concrete/pressure-tight) and ship metal corrosion techniques used there. Concept art showed curved buildings, but we got mostly squared/rectangular in game views. There has been talk of using some Roman era formulations for underwater use (lime and volcanic ash) which have held up for millenia (though that might NOT really be particularly strong concrete). ::As for the bulkhead thing I would say its the right place to put it and a monolithic slab would be the way (one pix even looks like it has edge reinforcement for the slots.) Small doors/portals into the buildings would be atypical, and you'd think there would be more decorations, but those could get blasted away (alot of real art deco was cast terra cotta or pressed metal panels fastened to the slab structure). Without assumptions though, article probably should just state that its blocked - I dont think the game designers considered it beyond 'flavor', and we dont see anything like an unlowered barrier mechanism the other ends where we DO have a clear view. :: 12:21, April 6, 2016 (UTC) :::@Unownshipper Ok, let’s take a look at the damage on that “wall”. It is not corrosion from water (There is no water around, corrosion on that scale would take many decades and corrosion has a totally different pattern), it is not damage from something running into it (impacts cause cracks in concrete, there are few cracks evident, not nearly what one would expect from a heavy impart. It would take a very large object weighing many tons to effect that large an area. Something much larger and heavier than a tram car. Not to mention the front of the tram car would be smashed in by the impact), it is not crumbling masonry (masonry looks totally different as it is bricks and mortar) or anything else I can think of. The “wall” is concrete and you only see that kind of damage in concrete from explosions. Go check out pictures from war zones (I have seen plenty). If that texture was on the ground, you would not hesitate to call it a crater. Also there are three distinct craters in the wall, two on the left and one on the right. You don’t get that by accident. Also if the tram car had rammed into the “wall”, it’s front would be smashed in and it would be much closer to the “wall”. Given its current placement it looks as if it rammed into the ruble in front of the “wall”, not the wall itself. So I think this matter is settled. :::Now, what is Athena’s Glory? It is an apartment building for the rich. It maybe not up to the level of Mercury Suites, but it’s certainly very upscale. “The Lap of Luxury” as the poster for it said. So let’s compare you “wall” and the area around it to Mercury Suites entrance. The first thing I notice is that the “wall” does not have any decoration. Rapture is BIG on decoration, but we don’t see any on this “wall”, not even stock decorations. I think we can excuse the lack of a big sign on the area since it would be a poor use of time to make just for this one place. Looking at other entrances, the closest resemblance is actually to Apollo Square and even that is only because they are similar in size. And at the other entrances, the archways are rather tall, some up to three times the height of a man. In fact all of them are much too tall/large to be hidden behind the piles of rubble. You can jump up on a piece of rubble just to the right of the fire and get a fairly good look at the “wall”. And please don’t say well those entrances are smaller, Rapture didn't work like that and you know it. :::So what we have is the “wall” that has none of the expected decorations, nor does it have any sign of the archways seen in all the rest of areas. This all points to the “wall” being something else other than a wall. As for why we don’t see these barriers in other places I already explained that. They are hidden behind a breakaway facade (which could be the source of the rubble in front of the barrier.) A large portion of the walls in Rapture are facades with utilities or dead spaces behind them anyway. Fort Frolic has some great examples of this. The barrier at Athena’s Glory was either activated by accident or on purpose for some unknown reason. And there are plenty of other anti-flooding barriers in Rapture, the Securis Doors. They may have done some stupid stuff in Rapture, but Bill McDonagh did try to do things the right way. :::And before you start taking umbrage, are you a game developer or have you worked in the industry doing level creation? I have as part of the Heavy Gear Assault Team, so I DO have an idea of the pressures and situation. And while I will say I am the most worthless dev there, I have learned a great deal and know the basics of mapmaking. Even back when BS1 was made, the Unreal Editor had “Copy Past” functions. It would have taken little time to copy Mercury Suites entrance, put it down by Athena’s Glory and maybe tweak it a little by putting a hunk of rubble right in front of the entryway to prevent anyone from seeing through it. Now it’s true that the mapper could have been badly pressed for time and couldn’t do what he/she wanted to do and fully intended to put a proper entrance there. The problem with that is the amount of time and detail going into the tram car wreck. Not only the tram car and the rubble, but a large fire splicers and loot. If you want a player to ignore something, you do NOT do things that attract their attention. That means no such things as large fires (light sources attract attention), enemies (hey something to fight!) and loot (might be something useful here so let’s look around). Given all that is down there, it’s clear the devs wanted the player to go down there and wonder a little about what might have happened. Now there is not a solid story there, but there is a story none the less. And the damage to the barrier behind the rubble is a part of that story. One last possibility is that they hit the rendering limit for that area and decided to alter what was in front of Athena’s Glory to cut down on complexity. If this occurred, then they changed the story of what happened here. Whatever the case is though, there is not an entryway there, hidden or otherwise. :::@75.36.136.136 While today there techniques for using aluminum in concrete safely, that today. I don’t even know if they knew about the problem back them. But in theory they could have solved that one. The other problem with aluminum loosing strength however was certainly not known when Rapture was constructed as the problem was only really discovered in 1954-155, years after Rapture was finished. Also buildings with concrete walls still flex and move under pressure, maybe not much, but they still do. And the taller a building is the more it will move. If they didn’t, then things would start to break. In construction it either gives a little or it breaks. Even the Empire State Building which is horrifically overbuilt gives a little under the force of the wind. You are correct that Rapture is relatively sheltered from the currents, even slow moving water generates a LOT of force. Since Rapture is volcanic zone, so wouldn’t there be earthquakes and they would HAVE to flex rather than be destroyed? Oh, and the upper floors of the buildings are occupied. We see this in Point Prometheus and Fontaine's Department store. sm --Solarmech (talk) 18:41, April 7, 2016 (UTC) :::Rapture really should have been alot squatter - if you count windows some of the buildings are over 400+ feet tall (and are thin)- and dont need to be, other than maybe for show (fake windows/lights have been done on sections of Art Deco towers in the real world). We really have to take the games views with a grain of salt, as theres no utility to building that tall (in real cities real estate was expensive so they built up, but Rapture has LOTS of open space) and as you say many negatives (imagine what happens when the elevators stop working as Rapture goes downhill, or simply the extra space/volume needed for 'express' in the elevator cores). :::A one MPH current/surge is wind equivalent in force to several hundred MPH air , and the leverage force upon the anchorage on the seabed gets rediculous. Rapture would have to be Massively overbuilt anyway even when squat simply for the water pressure. One would expect for the site chosen the seamount would definitely be inactive, and after ages the seabed relatively stable (low earthquake risk and nice solid slabs of igneous rock). :::Anyway, required fixing the aluminum then means equally fixing steel, and apart from that RetCon Ryan statement, steel should have been used for the rebar (and special non-corrosive alloys for window framing/anchors). That Ryanium the novel mentions (whatever it is) supposedly was very expensive and probably not viable for the huge amount of rebar Rapture's mass of concrete requires. ::: 00:25, April 8, 2016 (UTC) ::::@Solarmech My apologies for the delay in responding to you. "Crumbling masonry" was clearly the wrong phrase. I'm not an engineer, I freely admit that, but I reiterate that you can't tell what caused the damage. I could argue that the trolly car (which is probably several tons) could've crashed into the wall and caused damaging cracks only an inch or so into the concrete, which (with the aid of gravity and time) allowed some surface level rock from the wall to fall away and thus create that crater-looking damage texture. I could argue all that, but that's not the point here. Instead, I look to your comment on the trolly. Indeed, if this were real life, then the front of the tram car would be smashed in by the impact, but the designers only made ONE tram car (that's why they're all labeled number 8). I can't attest to how long it would've taken to design, render, and upload a smashed in trolly car, but clearly it wasn't worth the effort (similar to the fact, as you yourself pointed out, that there was no point in designing a marquee for Athena's). "Cutting corners," I suppose, is too harsh a word to describe this kind of decision, but it's clear that the designers made the most with what they had whether that meant copying or repurposing. With this mindset, the damage texture was reused, resized, and turned on the vertical to represent the destruction when, if they wanted to go for extreme realism, a new and unique damage texture truly would've been called for. ::::It isn't my intention to question your knowledge of engineering, minerals, war damage, game design, or any other field you maybe familiar with. I sincerely apologize if any of my comments came off that way. My goal is to maintain the content policies on this site. I'm just trying to offer possible alternatives/reasonable doubt so that speculation is not added to the main article. Again, it's enough just to indicate that Athena's Glory isn't accessible without suggesting that it has no entrance period. It's not necessary to go further, and it stretches into a field of assumption that I'm not comfortable with. ::::I hope I've made a case for myself, but I'll still answer your other questions as well. The lack of decoration does bother me too. I can only assume that you weren't meant to linger around the entrance site for too long. The narrative of Code Yellow increasingly shortening Jack's lifespan should offer enough incentive to book it over Mercury Suites, so maybe the designers just weren't motivated to go too much into detail. Still, I can offer an alternative: what if that whitish rubble with the rebar is (partially) the fancy decor? What if the ornamentation simply became dislodged and fell as a result of the crash? It's a stretch, but it is possible AND it would explain why it's a different shade of grey than the rest of the stonework around it (AKA, the decoration was meant to contrast the rest for artistic effect). ::::I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that . I will admit it that even I have a problem with that aspect. It does contrast the rest of Rapture strangely to think that such a standard sized set of doors would be utilized in the city that does everything on large scale. Still... if I want to leap through a hurdle, I could argue that the two doors outlined in my sketch above were Securis bulkheads and that beyond them was a typical grand entrance befitting an Olympus Heights residence. That theory, much like your flood barrier one, would be a stretch as none of the other apartments follow that format, but from a building design/logic stand point it makes sense. As someone pointed out earlier, there ought to have been more separation between such critical, cavernous spaces in case of leaks. ::::In regards to the "breakaway facade" notion: please note again that none of criticisms are personal in nature, but this is going to call for some hyperbole. A hidden facade, though possible in real life, is just too much of a leap to be taken seriously on the main page. I have no problem with it being discussed as theory here on the Talk Page, but we can't list an imagined element as evidence. ::::Let me list an example: Go to Mercury Suites, stop at the security check-in desk, look left (beneath the Security Camera), then look right. There's nothing on these two walls, but you know what there should be? Blocked passages, locked doors, or sealed security gates. To what you may ask? To the rest of Mercury Suites. If you look at the whole of the building when traveling through the transit tunnel, then you notice that the Mercury stretches downward for SEVERAL stories. We should see far more than the scant number of apartments Jack can actually explore. Those imagined pathways should lead to elevators, stairwells, hallways, etc. to all the other apartments, but alas there are no pathways present there. Perhaps, I reasoned, those doorways were sealed off during the war so that if roving terrorists broke past the security forces, they would only be able to gain access to a limited number of residences. The people who actually lived in those other apartments would surely not be thrown out of their homes. Rather, they'd gain access to the building via the basement Rapture Metro (similar to how Elizabeth enters Artemis Suites through a ground floor station that we previously didn't know existed). Lastly, because this is Rapture and craftsmen take pride in their work (even at war time), they covered over the blocked doorways with paneling and tile work so (when they were finished) it all looked seamlessly integrated. ::::Do you see how crazy that is? Everything I've listed is possible but we have no way of proving it. It's just theory/head canon. If we were to add the supposed flood barrier hidden behind hidden facade theory then we'd be opening the floodgates for everyone else who had a theory that'd correct the logic faults of Rapture. I agree, it's not great that they put loot and enemies hanging around something that wasn't meant to be a focal point, but Jack just went through a firefight after planting the Electromagnetic Pulse Bomb in Hephaestus and dealing with Splicers as he headed to Rapture Central Control. Maybe they felt they needed to give the player a place to restock some needed supplies before heading into a new, unknown district. ::::One last time, I don't mean to insult your thought process or experiences. We can both agree that there isn't an actual entrance to Athena's Glory just as there isn't an actual Athena's Glory. Still, we known that narratively there's supposed to be one. I hope we can agree, for the sake of the main page, it's better to err on the side of vagueness and just state the known truths: Jack finds himself at the tram tunnel to Athena's Glory, but isn't able to gain access to the apartment complex because rubble and an overturned trolly blocks his way. ::::Unownshipper (talk 11:01, April 16 2016 (UTC) ::::We are putting more effort into analysing it than they did creating it. The priority was dressing up an area for a direction the player wasn't to go beyond, with an average effort (given limited budgets of effort and rendering). Vague as usual with it simply being implied its 'blocked', for whatever cause with some Splicers camped out to dress it up. Indications of openings/more decorations/mechanisms weren't needed (and considered wasted effort for anything more than that) for a plot where we are to go the opposite direction. It might have been nice to show a system of city protection (our big emergency bulkheads) , but if intended THAT would have been shown in the clear to make the obvious point. The trolley system's illogical design demonstrated they didnt care to carry through much beyond 'half an idea' about portraying things 'as they should have been' . ::::We KNOW it is blocked (this end of the connecting transport viaduct), they have sufficient wreckage to imply the mess the city has become, but the player is intended to be aimed the opposite way. We understand what it probably should have been, but the priority was leading to other 'plot advancing' places. Eliminating assumptions, it is 'blocked' and mentioning further detail beside what obviously shown is MORE than the game makers actually thought/cared about. :::: 20:00, April 17, 2016 (UTC)